Friction
by Cyanide Lemons
Summary: He liked to think of himself as someone with a genteel soul. Someone who had been brought up with manners and a friendly attitude; he was southern-bred hospitality at its finest, guns included. Third in tf2 series.


An: So still not happy with this, but at this point I don't think I'll ever be happy with it.

Third in tf2 series

…

He liked to think of himself as someone with a genteel soul. Someone who had been brought up with manners and a friendly attitude; he was southern-bred hospitality at its finest, guns included.

There were only a couple of things that could set him off; someone tampering with his machines; someone disregarding his personal boundaries; and things that were based solely on emotions.

He was, after all, a rather practical person.

So he was not all that impressed with Blutarch Mann, who wasn't a practical man by any measure. What was worse was that he had no concept of space and was most definitely a man ruled by emotions. By the first meeting he already wanted to rip the man's hand off. But he had agreed to repair his grandfather's machine, and somewhere along the way a pen had been shoved in his hand, along with a legal document.

It was a contract.

He had read it over with a strict eye that had the company owner twitching, though that was more of a pretense. He was already aware of what it said. He'd known what it said before he had walked into the room. His grandfather had had one exactly the same, after all.

And like his grandfather, he knew before he had even signed the papers that there was a very good chance he would not come back alive. The brothers had shown to be rather… possessive with their toys, and he had no allusions to being anything but a toy. He would most likely only be released after his death, and with the machines he was building, that wouldn't be for some time yet. He could, he supposed, have refused the contract. It would have been the smart thing to do, maybe even the sane thing to do. But he had to only take one glimpse at the pile of notes and schematics strewn across the desk to know he was neither.

When RED had first approached him to make the machine for them, which technically didn't break the contract with BLU in letter but rather (_I just felt this flowed better_) in spirit, he'd known that the whole thing was a setup. There was no way that both companies had that kind of surveillance on each other without the other knowing, and since BLU had not mentioned anything about not going to RED… it meant they had known and endorsed the double-crossing. For some reason the companies wanted to continue their feud, and based on what he had perceived at BLU, it was most likely that the Manns were just figure heads.

He had had no idea who really was controlling the companies, had no interest in finding out. His mind had been fixated completely on his grandfather's documents.

He could feel his face stretch to compensate for the grin that slashed across his face, his heart beat as possibilities raced through his mind. He would take the Australium and make the Mann's life machine, close the door on ever living his life in a world without constant surveillance and direction… he would sell his soul. Because in the coded and dirt soiled papers was more than some old man's dream, was more than some gluttonous rivalry.

It was parallax motors, lynxmotion Pan's and pistons. It was direct drives, NanoCores and microcontrollers and things that had not been invented yet. It was big guns and bigger rockets.

And he knew that was only the beginning. His grandfather had developed more than what the Manns where aware of, and the puny pile of notes BLU had handed him was only a drop in the bucket of his genius. With a little digging, a couple of adjustments, the things he could make would revolutionise the world of engineering.

Would revolutionise the world.

At the beginning that was truly all he thought about. The machines where his life after all, he hadn't really thought of the consequence of them being built. But it was standing on the site of a freshly constructed base, in the middle of nowhere, watching men go and die, only to be reborn, did he truly understand the impact.

That night he went into his workshop, locked the door and burnt all his notes. It wouldn't matter if he no longer had the blueprints, because they were all imprinted in his head. But now at least no one else would be able to get to them, no one would realise what he had created, would create.

He had thought that would be the end of it. A naïve thought, but well justified by the fact that so far the war was based on who had the technological advantage. He had thought that now that BLU was the one with that advantage it would all end. He hadn't anticipated the RED's to have already gotten a copy of his notes. But it was more than they had gotten the notes; they had been given a prototype. The exact same one he had given the company when they had found out about him ignoring their commands to not build anything but the life machine.

And with this realisation came a surge of anger. _They had tampered with his machines. _Not perhaps in a physical sense, but in his mind it was still tampering.

This was truly the turning point.

This was when he went from not caring what the companies where doing and going along with their plans for the sake of the devices, to not caring and actively going against them for the sake of the devices.

He nursed his antagonism like he did everything else; calmly and with precision. It was subtle, more subtle than the snail-eating bastard Spy himself. He kept a smile on his face and never so much as blinked when he saw his competition building _his machines._

He didn't bother mentioning the sabotage to his team, one muttered accusation of Spy had them assuming it was the enemy who had stolen the files, but he did keep an eye on those he thought most likely to have been screwed by the company.

He wasn't surprised to see that that was nearly all of them. They all had different reasons for being there, but they all had the same reason for not leaving. The contracts had been constructed with a deal of care not usually found when talking about a morally inept company such as BLU.

If ever the contract was terminated before the set date they had the right to repossess all property and to destroy any and all trace of the contract, or involvement of the company. This included the signatory, and all people with a close connection to the signatory.

With one wrong move the whole group could sign their own death warrant.

It was devious, and something that had obviously been done over the head of Blutarch Mann, because there was no way that man had the kind of smarts to dream up something like that. They had been lured into a trap like a group of hogs. He was just waiting for when they realised they still had their teeth.

He knows it will only take a little push for the team to rebel, he knows he is in the right position to give that little push. He is well liked, and thought of as intelligent. People will listen to him.

And if they don't listen to him they will damn well listen to his guns.

He was still a genteel soul from Texas, who was friendly but more likely to start a conversation on bio-mechanics than sports. He connected with a couple of his co-workers, built things for various people when needed, even joined in on the Friday night poker games. And if he looked at the walls around him with contempt, well you could chalk that up to the lack of heat.


End file.
